> > There are 52! bridge hands, so a random hand has
> > log2(56!) = 226 bits of entropy or 68 decimal digits worth. Are they
> > generating that much entropy per hand now? If so, how?
>
> Generating that much entropy would be pointless. All that's needed is
> enough entropy to be unguessable in the seed and a cryptographically
> secure pseudo raandom number generator.
Are you sure? A typical PRNG uses a 31 or 32 bit seed, which means that it
could only generate 2^32 out of the 2^226 possible shuffles, a vanishingly
small fraction of the total. (A few years back when the Unix PRNG only had a
16 bit seed, this was the basis of an extremely effective dictionary attack
on "randomly" generated passwords.)
Maybe the set of shuffles generated by a good PRNG are sufficiently many and
well enough distributed through the total set that they're not amenable to
exhaustive or statistical analysis, so it wouldn't matter, but this strikes
me as exactly the kind of shortcut not to take when the issue at hand is the
credibility of the shuffling process.
Besides, by the time you've gathered 32 bits of true entropy, gathering
another 195 bits isn't a lot more work.
Regards,
John Levine, [EMAIL PROTECTED], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47
